Fire safety engineering is developing rapidly, following the need to control life loss and damage by applying the lessons learned from past fire events. Structural engineers are primarily responsible for the fire resistance of structures, which is also part of a greater plan of fire protection measures that finally provide the required safety guarantees for buildings.
The fire resistance of a structure though, is very important even in the presence of active systems like sprinklers – fire resistance itself is considered a passive system – as these systems may still fail and in this case a second line of defence would be required.
Fire design was applied in a prescriptive approach until relatively recently. The extensive adoption of computers and the development of numerical methods in engineering is finally enabling the transition from this prescriptive approach to a more engineered one, in the style of other structural engineering calculations. However, this transition is partially blocked by the lack of practical tools for daily use by practicing engineers. IDEA StatiCa aspires to make advanced fire design an easily applied process and accessible to any engineer.
In this webinar, we will explore the application of CBFEM for fire design and demonstrate how to use IDEA StatiCa Connection and IDEA StatiCa Member to assess the resistance of connections and steel/concrete members in the strength domain.